


Memoirs of a Daiyoukai

by Anonymous



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Drabble Collection, Gen, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:40:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22966309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The life and times of the Inu no Taisho.
Kudos: 2
Collections: Anonymous





	1. Stench

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nippon = Japanese word for Japan. Will also be referred to as the Islands or the Archipelago.  
> Chūgoku = Japanese word for China. Will also be referred to as the Continent or the Mainland.
> 
> "|dialogue|" = character speaking in Chinese
> 
> If not otherwise stated, assume characters are speaking Japanese

The stench is nearly overwhelming.

Blood, tangy and thick. Rot, heady and cloyingly sweet. Miasma, foul and heavy enough to choke on.

Slaughter paints the earth black-red. Great bubbling pools of what must have once been blood, but has been polluted beyond recognition. Grey, rancid chunks of flesh that used to be humble villagers. Dark fumes rising in wisps from spilt innards. Severed limbs that twitch stubbornly before going still. Oozing blue froth.

Exposure to the toxic gases has eaten away at the sleeves of his haori. Congealed miasma drips from his blade, the steel warping and bending and buckling.

“Keh. Useless.”

The ruined weapon is discarded amongst the gore, where it continues to melt into nothingness. He turns away. 

Another corpse lingers close to the swift white rush of the nearby river. Prone, fissures splitting open from desiccated flesh, no trace of a blade’s deadly kiss. Foamy miasma weeps sluggishly from the wounds, pools midnight-black beneath the body, spills toxic into the current. Armor in crumbling shambles, tarnished and shattered. Pelt of brittle fur turned spectral silver, blanched by a wicked influence. Fingertip to shoulder of the right arm is scorched beyond recognition, charred right down to black and brittle bones.

The stench of poison and decay threatens to asphyxiate as he draws closer. His eyes sting and water as he kneels before the corpse, valiantly fighting the urge to retch. Even without turning it over, he can tell this is the cadaver of the youkai he was pursuing—or “yaoguai”, as they are called on the Continent.

Whatever it’s called, it’s unarmed.

_Dammit._

“|Please spare me!|” comes a sudden cry, giving him pause.

Blinking, the youkai peers into the remains of the corpse’s pelt, at the armor crusted in rust. With claw-tipped fingers, he reaches out to lift the underside of the cuirass back. Beneath its shadow, and lost in the crumbling bristles of blanched fur, is where he, quite bewilderedly, discovers a quivering little speck of brown. It radiates the metallic sharpness of fear, donning a miniature set of clothes and clutching tight to what looks like a tiny bindle tied at the end of a twig. A moment or two passes before he comprehends that the cowering speck is a living thing, a flea of some kind.

“|I beg you!|” continues the flea in the language of Chūgoku. “|Spare life. Please, please, please!|”

“Your accent is terrible,” deadpans the youkai in the language of Nippon.

Immediately, the flea—youkai flea—freezes. It (he?) peers up with wide, watery eyes. “Y-You are from the Islands,” comes the remark, breathy with relief.

“I am.”

At once, the flea prostrates himself almost exaggeratedly, somewhere between submission and flattery. It’s almost as gratifying as it is bewildering. “Please, great and mysterious youkai of Nippon, show me mercy! If you spare my life, then I, Myoga, shall devote myself to you as your eternal servant for as long as I shall live! I swear it!”

_Servant, eh?_

“I have no interest in killing bugs like yourself,” he says, rising back to his feet.

With a small _boing_ of insect legs, the flea now occupies his shoulder, and has gone from cowering to jubilant with relief. “Oh, thank you! Thank you so much, Master! I shall not disappoint you! I swear upon my life that I shall serve you forever, for as long as you will have me!”

The flattery is overt, almost cloying. Still, it is something he finds himself warming to with each word the little creature babbles. Having a servant is something he has never known, improper though it may be. The prospect, however, is not altogether unwelcome. A vassal under his command, at the mercy of his every order and whim... mm, yes, that is a pleasing thought.

“Myoga, was it?” The flea nods fervently. The youkai raises a brow. “Tell me—this corpse here is of the swordsman who attacked these humans, is it not?”

Something in Myoga the flea sobers at the reminder of the carnage laying nearby. He eyes the grotesque display with an onlooker’s sympathy. “The women here were doing their washing by the river. He came from almost nowhere, nearly rabid in his incoherence, and cut them down without mercy. The men heard their screaming and came to defend them, only to join in their fate.”

Behind them, the current grows dark as liquid miasma spills into it, taints it to a murky and putrid black-brown. A river as wide and deep as this must be the sort that many rely on—humans and animals and youkai (or, ah, yoaguai) alike. But any who drink from it now will have their lips break into weeping blisters, their throats and bellies melted by the poison. Dipping clothes in to wash will have the fabric corrode and fray. Otherwise healthy fish will drift to the surface, white bellies exposed, as the toxin flows further downstream. Entire forest shall find themselves brown and wilted down to their roots.

The youkai wrinkles his nose at the thought of such widespread death. It is wretched, and unnecessary, and there is absolutely nothing he can do to cleanse the river of its pollution.

All the more reason to find the damn thing and reign it in—before the land is scarred beyond recognition. “And what of the sword the yaoguai carried?”

That seems to confuse Myoga, and he falters. “The sword, Master?”

“The sword by which these humans were cut down. What happened to it?”

What follows is a brief and pensive pause, but eventually Myoga replies, “If I recall, one of the men managed to wrest it free of the swordsman. Most of it was a blur, you understand... I only remember the swordsman suddenly collapsing, dead, and the man running off with a great howl. Oh—a howl that gives me _chills_ to think about, Master! Chills _indeed_!”

He takes a moment to digest this knowledge. A human in possession of the sword... “He acted like a man possessed, did he not?”

“Oh yes! That’s a very good way of putting it!”

 _Figures._ No human could ever make the will of a youkai blade bend for him—and certainly not one such as this. Even lesser youkai find themselves overwhelmed by the sword’s malevolence, reduced to mindless instruments of pure destruction. No mere mortal could hope to escape such a fate.

“Very well,” the youkai says, and turns his nose to the air.

A lesser sense of smell would find itself incapacitated by the dizzying stink of rot and blood and miasma that thickens the air so, pollutes it near to the point of inhabitability. But his keen nose is able to rise beyond the muddied cacophony, hone in on something far more precious.

There! A mere whisper, but the same nonetheless. The very scent that beckoned him across the sea. An unholy braid of sulfur and death and power.

He turns, facing the north. The trail winds upstream, contrary to the current. “Let us go, then.”

“G-Go?” repeats Myoga, nervously. “Go where?”

“Where else?” answers the not-yet Inu-no-Taisho, starting forward. “To make that sword mine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gonna be honest, I'm not really in this fandom, but I recently rewatched (and finally finished) the anime and I have lots of ideas about Inudad. So here's some drabbles about everyone's favorite posthumous dog demon.
> 
> Fair warning, updates will be irregular.


	2. Master

It is quiet at the riverside. Peaceful. Traveling upstream, the current is clear and untainted by the miasma. The youkai plunges his hands deep into the water, sighing.

From a distance, Myoga studies his new Master. He is no child, but is not quite grown, either—at most, he has maybe seen a century or two, but no longer, the angles of his face still soft in places. Indigo stripes cut jaggedly across his cheekbones, magenta painting his eyelids almost as makeup would. His complexion is brown as the silt that washes up on a river shore, which makes the high, streaming tail of silver hair all the brighter in comparison. His youkai nature is made evident in the bladed point of his ears, the polished amber of his irises, the long and deadly claws that tip his deft but calloused fingers. Though the aura that he radiates is nothing to sneeze at, he dresses in the garb of a common vagrant, with dirtied clothes in dull, unremarkable colors. Only the furred cape draped over his shoulders, hanging heavy and creamy-soft over his back and so long that the two “tails” it splits into drag behind him as he walks, speaks to any kind of noble bearing.

At some point, Master seems to have become aware of Myoga’s curiosity. He flashes a glance from the corner of his eye that makes the flea tense, but he only turns back to the river a moment later.

“The man is mortal and the sword’s power will burn him to cinders,” he explains, answering Myoga’s unspoken question. “He will not go far before he succumbs. We can afford some leisure.”

Something tells Myoga not to question Master on the subject. Perhaps it is the calm assuredness with which he speaks, as though he were an expert upon the subject of mortal men possessed by youkai swords. Or perhaps it is the heady pressure of a not-yet-daiyoukai that thrums in his blood, dizzying in its potency. A ripple of old-new power—something ancient that has, conversely, not yet come into itself.

But there’s something else, too. Something that has a question weighting in the back of his mind.

“Master, if I may... you are an inuyoukai, are you not?” And then Myoga flinches, waiting.

“Ho. You can tell, can you?”

...huh. Most youkai are more inclined to squish him than indulge his curiosity. Myoga sits, bewildered at this show of leniency. “Ah... Yes.”

“You are correct.” Master withdraws his hands and shakes them out. Washing off the lingering miasma, likely. Wise, given the state of his sleeves.

 _I suppose he feels no need to hide it._ Most youkai aren’t particularly shy about their parentage—unless they are hanyou, but that is a different story. A noble legacy is something to take pride in, after all. Even inuyoukai, though most of which can trace their origins back to the inugami and the black magic that birthed them, are inclined to boast.

 _Still,_ _for an inuyoukai to have_ _power like **this**..._

“We have only just met,” Master says, interrupting Myoga’s musing and nearly causing him to leap out of his exoskeleton. When Myoga looks up at him, the inuyoukai’s gaze has no hint of harshness or condemnation—in fact, it could be Myoga’s imagination, but he thinks he catches a warm flicker of amusement in that golden gaze. “Questions are natural. Ask. I shall answer what I wish to.”

Well! That’s _far_ more generous than he was expecting. Myoga wonders if he really did get lucky, offering his life to such a tolerant man. “Er... if it is not an imposition...”

There is a beat, and no refute. Master says nothing, only tilts his head calmly. Expectant.

With a rush of foolish boldness, Myoga plows ahead. “You wouldn’t happen to be a descendant of Inuhime-no-kami, would you, Master?”

Recognition passes languidly across Master’s face, but his gaze remains carefully neutral. “You speak of the dog-goddess of childbirth and rearing?”

“The very same!” It is a relief that Myoga does not have to elaborate. The goddess, though spoken of quite highly in Nippon, is not particularly renown beyond the islands.

Master does not twitch. His gaze is calm, expectant, unblinking.

Nerves flutter deep in Myoga’s belly. He clears his throat, fighting the urge to fidget beneath that patient stare. “Inuhime-no-kami, they say, is wed to a man of the heavens, and is foremother to many powerful inuyoukai. They say that all her children have hair the color of starlight, and crescent marks upon their brows.”

“I do not have a crescent mark upon my brow.”

Indeed, he does not. Master’s brow is smooth, silt-brown, unmarred by any distinct shapes or intrusive pigments. Myoga falters. “I... I see that.”

Still. The _power_ that sings in his blood-scent—

“Then I am not a descendant of Inuhime-no-kami.”

And this, Myoga knows, is not a lie. It would be far more prudent to lie about possessing such a noble lineage, rather lying about existing beyond it.

Which only leaves him with more questions. Inuyoukai are not common, and those with blood that burns with such might, those who have the potential to ascend into daiyoukai ranking, are usually of a divine sire or lineage. And Master’s long hair is silver as starlight, nimbus-bright, exactly what the celestial children of Inuhime-no-kami are said to all inherit from their godly parents. But if he is not of _that_ lineage, then he is an even greater mystery, for Myoga can think of no other place from which he received such clean and crisp power in his blood.

Abruptly, Master stands and turns swiftly on his heel. His back signals an end to the conversation. “We have wasted enough time. Let us catch up to the sword before the trail disappears entirely.”

Part of Myoga wants to protest—there’s still so little he knows about the youkai whose claws he has placed his obedience, his very life—but he immediately swallows it down. In a world full of those far more powerful than yourself, survival lays in knowing when it is wise not to push your luck. He did not live as many centuries as he has by disregarding that cardinal rule.

Once he collects his things and takes his place upon the inuyoukai’s shoulder, they set out again. The silence is not altogether uncomfortable, but questions still lay heavy on Myoga’s mind.

In the end, he just can’t himself. “May I at least ask your name, if it is not too much trouble to you?”

Master casts him a periphery glance, seems to consider, then turns away. “Simply ‘Master’ will suffice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inuhime-no-kami is a very minor goddess in the Shinto mythology, and is specifically worshiped at the Inu-Jinja in Nagoya.


	3. Ruins

Dawn breaks on an overcast sky as they come across the ruins of a village.

The sight is far from easy to gaze upon. Houses reduced to tangles of splintered debris. Cavernous furrows carved deep into the land. Scorch marks that sear themselves into wood and earth and ruined sacks of rice. Horses decapitated messily. Livestock running rampant if they have not been wantonly slaughtered. Great black puddles of blood and miasma from which rise the foulest of fumes. Earth reduced to a revolting muck that sucks hard at the feet of any unwelcome intruders.

Countless cadavers of fallen humans—innocent villagers—attempt to choke the ground from sight. Men and women and children and elders, all the same. Grey faces still contorted into expressions of utter terror, wounds weeping azure froth and black chunks of what must have once been blood.

“It came through here,” Master says, stating the obvious.

Nausea twists deep in Myoga’s belly. The scent of blood, usually so wonderfully tantalizing, has never been more unwelcoming than it has now.

If Master is bothered by the stench decay and poison and gore, he does not show it. There is no regard for the sludge that squelches beneath his bare feet, painting his legs and the cuffs of his hakama dark and wet. No acknowledgment of the filth amassing on the dragging tails of his furred cape, to the point where it is rendered nearly ruined. He weaves through the carnage with singular purpose, and only doles out the occasional look of pity from the corners of his eyes. Otherwise, no heed is paid to where he is, and what he wades through.

Myoga envies him his nerves.

After a long while, the detritus tapers off. The land continues to blacken in a long trail leading northward of the ruins, but it is narrow, uncluttered by any fresh bodies. Only the shriveled plants and scorched, cracking earth leaves an indication that something unnatural left this village behind.

A growl of frustration rumbles low in Master’s throat. “Shit. We missed it.”


	4. Servant

Not moments later, the villagers rise again.

It is not life—or, at least, it is not any _natural_ life. Not by any proper or improper definition of the word. The freshly-animated corpses that stagger lazily upright are all limp grey limbs and slackened jaws and glassy eyes rolling back into their heads. None of the terror loosens from their expressions. Chunky black blood continues to weep sluggardly from the wounds that took their lives. Horrible moans resonate within their lifeless chests, spill forward in chilling wails from their sagging throats.

Lucky for Myoga, there’s a nice barrel nearby.

Battle wages beyond the wooden walls of his makeshift shelter. Snippets drift his way, sharp and choppy fragments that only serve to stoke the fire of terror beneath his carapace. Grunted exertion, growled frustration. Wet tearing of flesh and bone. Youki thrumming in the air. Bodies squelching as they hit the muck-ridden ground. Pneumatic hisses, followed by the ever-growing foulness of miasma in the air. The moist burbling of foam. Fear burns cold through him as he cowers, waiting for the end.

After a long while, silence falls. Myoga cracks a wary eye open.

Suddenly, the lid of the barrel gives a warning creak as it is pried clean off. Dull, gauzy light floods the darkness wholly. Myoga throws his hands over his head, shrieking, “|Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!|”

“They are dead now,” comes a familiar rumble, touched with annoyance.

Blinking, Myoga glances up. Master’s silhouette is stark as it towers over him, his hair shining platinum against the dreary and overcast heavens, as though some god had seen fit to bless him with a divine countenance. Blood flecks his cheekbones in a haphazard array of minuscule ruby droplets. Azure film coats his fingertips, drips from the ends of his long ponytail. Black-red gore paints his arms from the elbow down. A foul-smelling and sludgy concoction of blood and half-melted foam has splattered across his haori, begun to burn holes in the fabric and reveal his white kosode to the world. And yet even with all this filth threatening to eclipse his magnificence, the triumphant inuyoukai is truly a sight to behold. Untouched by injury, unsullied by wounds, the hazy glow of the concealed sun poised behind his head as though to bathe him in a halo of glory.

Relief nearly sweeps Myoga off his feet. “Master, you’re safe! I was so worried about you, truly! I should have figured that a magnificent youkai such as yourself would have no trouble— _ack_!”

His jubilation is broken off when he suddenly finds himself pinched mercilessly between blood-soaked claws. All at once, Master’s face is too close, eyes narrowed and smoldering gold like the last embers of a dying fire. His lip curls back to reveal gleaming fangs longer that Myoga is tall. “You _wretch_ ,” comes the accusatory growl. “You left me to fight those bastards off _alone_ , didn’t you?!”

“N-No!” Myoga sputters. “I was merely— Well, you see, fighting is not n-necessary my _forte_ — I-I knew I could be m-much more useful to you in many _other_ ways, so I—”

“ _Hid_ in a fucking _barrel_ while _I_ dispatched the mob?!” Master interrupts, verging on furious. His thumb and forefinger begin to press mercilessly into Myoga’s carapace.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. “I-I-I see it more as a-admiring your p-prowess from afar!”

Sadly, this does nothing to stave off the inuyoukai’s anger. In an instant, Myoga finds himself completely flattened. Ow.

While Myoga fights to regain the third dimension, Master goes on, tone leveling into a hard but flinty with displeasure. “Do you just offer your services to _anyone_ who spares your life, or do you actually put _meaning_ into those words?”

Well, of _course_ not! Myoga has lost track of the youkai he’s offered his service to when desperate times call for desperate measures. Most ignore him, do not deign to raise their hand against such a pitiful creature, much less accept something so pathetic as a servant, and so he is content. But every now and again, there’s a fool that _will_ hold him to his word—and then Myoga will watch as that very fool perishes in a completely avoidable battle. After which, he’ll be free to barter his servitude in exchange for his life once again. It’s worked for centuries, see. A tried and proven method.

But telling his current master this is only going to infuriate him further, and Myoga _very_ much enjoys breathing. So instead he pops back into himself and replies, “O-Of course I do! I take _much_ pride in my vassalage!”

Skepticism sours the inuyoukai’s noble features. “ _True_ vassals battle alongside their masters. _And_ die with them.”

Oh dear. Not one of _those_. “I fear I will die long before you do, in that case, my lord.”

“Then _so be it_ ,” comes the warning, a growl so low and deep that Myoga feels the vibration from head to toe. “I am understood?”

Eep! “Y-Yes, my lord.”

Clawed fingers curl a warning around the open palm where Myoga sits. Through the gaps, Master’s saffron eyes _burn_. “You will not abandon me again. You swear this?”

“O-On my life.” _Please don’t kill me._

As suddenly as the hand enclosed, the fingers uncurl. “Very good, flea.”

Myoga falls to his knees, shaky. _Oh good gods in the heavens, I’m going to die, aren’t I?_


	5. Undead

Master throws the door open so hard that the half-standing wreckage of the house nearly collapses from the force alone. His haori is in such tatters, blackened and charred to the point of irrecoverability, that what’s left of it threatens to slip free of his body entirely and seems to remain there only through sheer force of will. Acid-burns have sank past the fabric and eaten at the kosode underneath, peppered it in little black spots. Dark mud paints his hakama, which itself is worn thin in places. Fiery exasperation smolders low in his gaze.

“No weapons, no decent clothes,” he rumbles, slamming the door closed behind him, another tremulous quake going through the wooden frame, “no _nothing_! This village is entirely _useless_!”

While Master continues to snarl to himself about the unreliability of human paupers and the villages they inhabit, and how they have nothing of value that is even worth raiding from their corpses, Myoga eyes what remains of the people who once inhabited this pathetic little hamlet. Their bodies have been torn up into messy, rancid chunks by what was doubtlessly the inuyoukai’s powerful claws. Azure froth crowns each bloody tear, just starting to melt into the dark pools of blood and liquid poison that turn the earth to noxious muck. Whatever clothes that the humans wore has been shredded beyond recognition. You would hardly believe that these were once living beings.

Or that, less than an hour ago, these in-tact cadavers that were once so still and lifeless gave a sudden start of movement. That they jerked into motion, propelled into an impossible second life.

“What on earth happened to them?” Myoga murmurs to himself, peering over the lip of the barrel.

“Those slain by the sword return as its undead minions.”

The suddenness of the master’s voice has Myoga nearly leaping right off the barrel and face-planting deep into the mud.

Turning, he finds the inuyoukai studying the slaughter in somber contemplation, his mouth drawn into a tight, grim line and a resigned pity congealing upon his features. Something in the conviction of his voice allows no leeway for doubt or argument on the subject—there is a heavy knowledge here that Myoga distinctly lacks. One that weighs heavily upon the mind and shoulders, leaden upon the skeleton, iron on the soul. It is a knowledge that made the relentless butchering of these bodies a necessity, and leaves him all the more melancholy for it.

Master closes his eyes, a sigh heaving itself free from the depths of his lungs. “If the sword had any use for them, they likely would have mobilized into an army—but it didn’t. And so they were left only as mindless dolls whose only purpose is to cause more death and wanton destruction.”

...come to think of it—this happened before, too. In his fright, Myoga had ducked into the pelt of the fallen yaoguai, praying to the gods for a miracle that would spare his life, and had not been paying much attention then. That last group of villagers from three days past, who also found themselves at the mercy of this demonic blade, had suffered the very same fate. Utterly motionless while death’s black shroud settled heavy over them, only to twitch into a second and spurious life when Master approached.

So the youkai blade that Master pursues is responsible for this, then.

The very blade that Master wishes to make _his_.

A shiver runs through Myoga’s being, and he peers up at his master, eyes wide. “Why in all the Sixteen Hells would you desire such an _awful_ blade?”

That seems to break Master from his musing. The pity snaps into a crisp, sharp focus all-too-suddenly, his eyes narrowing into merciless slits. “Seeing as I am quite annoyed with you at the moment, flea,” is the growled response, “it would be unwise of you to ask any more irritating questions.”

“O-Of course,” Myoga splutters out. _S-Scary!_ “My apologies!”


End file.
